Aetodactylus (meaning "eagle finger") is a genus of targaryendraconian pterosaur. It is known from a lower jaw discovered in Upper Cretaceous rocks of northeastern Texas, United States.
Aetodactylus (meaning "eagle finger") is a genus of targaryendraconian pterosaur. It is known from a lower jaw discovered in Upper Cretaceous rocks of northeastern Texas, United States.
==Description== Aetodactylus is based on SMU 76383 (Shuler Museum of Paleontology, Southern Methodist University), a nearly complete lower jaw lacking the right retroarticular process (the bony prong posterior to the jaw joint), part of the posterior end of the mandibular symphysis (where the two halves of the lower jaw meet), and all but two teeth. This specimen was found in 2006 by Lance Hall near a construction site in Mansfield, near Joe Pool Lake (recorded as SMU Loc. 424). The rock it was found in is a calcareous marine sandstone rich in mud–sized particles, from the middle Cenomanian-age (approximately 97 million years old) Tarrant Formation. Also found were fish teeth and vertebrae, and indeterminate bones. The Tarrant Formation is the lowest rock unit of the Cenomanian–Turonian–age Eagle Ford Group.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).